Some time ago, our support team and I were sitting and talking in our office, discussing how to better support our customers.

The idea of adding live chat to our website popped out. We thought that adding chat to our website might turn into a better product support and would add a few more signups.

But to be honest, at the time, I pretty much disliked the idea. Chat? Seriously? That lame box in the lower right corner?

Our challenges

But as a few days rolled by, we continued thinking about implementing chat. A few ideas began to emerge and while chat was on our radar, I started to change my mind.

We finalized our list and came up with 3 things live chat would help us with.

Challenge 1 – Support Team Time Management

We have a relatively small support department for our customer base. Depending on the time of day [and alignment of the stars], the support team could be super busy or super slow.

During the slow times, we were looking for another channel for support and sales questions. In the busy times, we need tools to support multiple customer conversations at the same time.

Challenge 2 – Some People Don’t Like Phone Calls

We know that many introverted people simply don’t like talking on the phone, it’s just their personality. But we might be tempted to think that the extroverts should love talking on the phone. Obviously, it’s not true. If you’re the super busy extrovert, the length and personal commitment of a call may lead you not call at all.

For us, it meant that by not opening up to new communication channels, we lose contact with these people.

Challenge 3 – Email Is Great, But…

Sometimes a problem or question is too complicated to explain it in an email, it needs to be solved in a real-time conversation. We see this often in our email support: a bunch of emails going back and forth for hours, trying to get a question answered.

We wanted to get rid of this problem.

Our customers deserve better, my search begins

With a new browser tab popped open, the search began. Initially, I found 3 or 4 chat systems which looked like they may be a good fit with our time clock system. I started a few trials to dig into these systems and to my disappointment, they seemed clunky and old school. There seemed to be either way too many features or the systems were hard to set up and run.

One of the last chat systems we tried was LiveChat. After starting a trial, a few questions developed, so we’ve engaged in a chat with them. As it turned out, to find out that they respond immediately. “We may be onto something here,” we thought.

Regardless of the number of questions we sent, they responded quickly and accurately every single time. We even threw in some pretty technical queries (something about the javascript code I think) and BAM, the answer came back.

At this point, we decided that LiveChat was an app for us.

Time to implement the chat system

Now that the decision was made to go with LiveChat, it was time to finish setup and installation. I added our support staff as agents (a whopping 2 minutes of my time here).

Next, I had to install the javascript code snippet into our site. LiveChat provides many integrations for WordPress, Weebly Shopify and many more, however, our site is built using ASP.NET. We had to do a little copy and paste.

A quick copy of a bit of script into our site and voila, we had chat! It took about 10 minutes to signup, setup and install, that’s impressive!

How chat benefits our customers (and us)

After a few months of using LiveChat, we revisited our original problem set and see that they have all been solved! Actually, we found several benefits that we were not thinking of during the research phase. Here are the main ways chat has benefited our customers and us:

We found that LiveChat smoothes out the busy and slow times for our support team,

LiveChat allows our phone phobic customers to get immediate answers,

Adding chat offers a real-time conversation, better than email,

We love the performance reporting,

The LiveChat quality badge is great for marketing,

LiveChat blog articles are very helpful, we read most that come to our inbox.

If you’d like to know how it translates into our business, here are some numbers.

It turned out that customers love this additional communication channel, during last 30 days we’ve achieved 98% high customer satisfaction score. The reason behind that might be also the fact that our average time of response is 42 seconds.

It also benefits our business; we’ve noticed that thanks to live chat, our conversion rate increased by additional 10%.

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About the author

Dean Mathews is the founder of OnTheClock, an online time clock app based in Clinton Township, MI. When he is not perfecting employee time tracking, Dean enjoys finding ways to make the world just a little better. You can find Dean on LinkedIn.